I Got ‘Da Powah!

I’m sure my July 22 post What’s More Dangerous Than Fake News? was the reason FaceBook’s stock experienced the worst one-day drop in stock market history just a few days later. Those three days between my post and the historic drop were simply due to the fact that posts usually take exactly that long to peak out on number of readers per day — so by Thursday, enough investors had gotten wind of my infuriation with FaceBook’s censoring of the post of a dear friend of mine to trigger the drop.

I’m sure those of you who know me, quick studies that you are, picked up on the humor in my opening paragraph. Thinking of humor reminds me of the old adage “All work and no play makes Jack [or Charles 😊 ] a dull boy.” This, in turn, brought to mind that although I inject humorous remarks into my posts now and then, all of them are on what I consider to be serious topics — serious simply because I am passionate in my belief that we are indeed in the midst of a major paradigm shift in this country [and in the world, for that matter,] and I feel almost what you might call a mission to point out the evidence of that shift and enlighten anybody who will listen to me as to what the New Paradigm is shaping up to be.

‘Nuf O’ That — Now For Some More Humor

Now that I have in the preceding paragraph at least injected the obligatory serious note for one of my posts, I’m going to take a break this week and just share some interesting points about FaceBook’s market capitalization plunge [some of which are humorous for me, but not, I’d say, for Mark Zuckerberg.] …

FaceBook lost about $100 billion [that’s a “b”] on Thursday 7/26. Worse, though, is that Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth “plummeted” by about $15 billion [yeah, that’s a “b,” too.] And don’t you know, it gets even worse if you can imagine that. … That drop knocked him down two entire notches on Forbes’ list of the richest people on the planet — from 4th to 6th, still behind Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ($149 billion), Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ($95 billion), LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault ($84 billion), and now also behind Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett ($83 billion) and Amancio Ortega ($72 billion), founder of retailing group Inditex. To add insult to injury, it cost him a top-five position on that list. Poor Mark’s net worth is now a paltry $67 billion [we’re still talking “b’s”, here.] My heart goes out to him. If he’s learned the lesson he needed to learn about value systems and worldview, it’s a shame that this newfound knowledge came at the cost of sending him into poverty.

Now that I’m On A Roll With This Humor …

Heck, I’m going to stay with humor this week and not even try to close this post on a serious note. I love the dry humor of John Kennedy, referring here not to the former President but to the current “Junior” Senator from my home state of Louisiana. I’ll close with some of my favorites from among his quips when responding to questions from the media on issues of the day. …

- “Facebook is a great company, but it’s no longer a company; it’s a country. That’s how powerful it is. And its behavior lately has kind of been getting into the foothills of creepy.”
- “I think they’re making a big mistake if they start tacking on extraneous issues to the budget. We have enough trouble doing a budget by itself. We haven’t had one since Moses walked the earth. It’s embarrassing.”
- “So far there’s been a lot of chopping, but I don’t see any chips flying. And I don’t think that’s going to change.” [referring to the battle du jour over gun control legislation]
- “I am not. I am petrified of giving the power to confiscate guns and ask questions later to public officials. … If you trust government, you obviously failed history class. The Native Americans gave up their guns, too.” [in response to a question about whether he is “afraid of the NRA”]
- “We’ve got … some hogs who have all four feet and their snout in the trough. And we’ve got to find out who they are, gentlemen.” [expressing thoughts about Pentagon contractors fleecing taxpayers]
- “It sounds like she was playing Frisbee in the quad during history class.” [referring to the author of a Washington Post article entitled “It’s time to give Socialism a try”]
- “As we say in Louisiana, President Trump is a hard dog to keep on the porch. He’s not a porch dog; he’s a running dog. He likes to do things his way.” [speaking of President Trump after the president fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson]
- “Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots. I think most Americans are wondering how some folks up here made it through the birth canal.” [in reference to one of the “budget shutdown” battles]

I’m stopping here not because there aren’t more of these — I could probably have found several times this many with Google’s continued help. I’m just invoking my self-imposed length limit for my blogs.

…

Well, maybe I unwittingly closed on a serious note after all. Judging from remarks like these, this not-so-Junior-sounding “Junior” Senator’s apparent assessment of the Washington establishment, and his perspective in general, are spot on! This guy’s up there in a class with the likes of Will Rogers and Yogi Berra.

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